If you’re Plenty of Fish account was deleted there are a number of reasons why and some steps you can take to prevent it happening again

It can be frustrating having your POF account deleted, particularly if you’ve spent some time and effort writing out your profile and customizing it to your liking.

Why your POF Account was Deleted

According to the POF blog there are six reasons your profile can get deleted

1. You are looking for casual sex
2. You’re married and not separated
3. You’re a scammer, a spammer, or using a fake or underrate profile
4. You’re just plain rude to others on the site
5. You post inappropriate photos
6. You login from a country where PlentyOfFish doesn’t exist yet

Plenty of Fish is the largest dating site in the world and it’s very difficult to keep track of everyone’s profile and monitor private conversations. Therefore POF relies upon both human intelligence and artificial intelligence system to detect suspicious activity that fits any of the above.

While I’m not familiar with the technical methods used by POF to detect suspicious activity I do know that the system will look for regular expressions or patterns of behaviour that could indicate suspicious activity.

These could include words, phrases, searches or selections you make indicating that you’re just looking for a hookup, that you’re married, or that you’re just using the site for commercial reasons.

Being rude to others or posting innapropriate photos on the site may result in your profile getting flagged by other users, leading to your activities being more closely scrutanized.

Websites can track your IP address which means that they know geographically whereabouts you live. If you login from a country where PlentyOFFish doesn’t exist yet, this would be an activity that is easy to detect and flag by the system.

How to Prevent your POF account from being Deleted

Simply be more cautious of the words, phrases, searches or selections you make that could indicate suspicious activity.

If you’re looking for a hookup there are plenty of sites that cater to this. If you chose to use the site for this there are more discreet ways of going about it.

Do not message people too quicky as your activity could be interpreted as automated activity usually carried out by spambots.

Do not copy and paste the same message to multiple users. It’s common to copy and paste the same message to multiple users to save time. After all sometimes you have to send multiple messages just to get one positive response. Copy and pasting the same message can save time. However this could be interpreted as automated behaviour. Therefore try and vary your messages, even if it just involves changing a few words here or there.

Taking time to create and customize your profile will indicate you’re a real person and not a spambot automatically creating worthless profiles just to send out automated messages.

My last piece of advice is to simply be pleasant, humorous and interesting. You’re more likely to make a positive impression, find a date and not get your account deleted.

Sarah Johnson

Sarah is a relationship and marriage counselor who provides relationship and counseling to couples. She also likes to write in her spare time.